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A Month in Siena, by Hisham Matar (2019)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Premise: The Libyan-British author‘s reflections on a month spent in Siena, adrift after coming to terms with the reality that he will never find out what happened to his father.

Review: Hisham Matar is a brilliant writer (I still can‘t believe his 2024 novel My Friends didn‘t make the Booker short list!) and this short memoir shows why. Cont.

I loved this! Matar becomes fascinated by the Sienese school of painting and decides to spend a month indulging in this fascination. It‘s a beautifully quiet book, part memoir, philosophy, travelogue and art history that I didn‘t know I needed or wanted so badly.

A really gorgeous, personal art-history-slash-memoir about the time the writer spent looking at Sienese art. I was expecting to find his life boring and be like ‘please get to the art‘ but I thought they married together beautifully. Particularly fascinating to get a non-Christian perspective from a writer from a Muslim country who loves renaissance biblical art.

#wintergames2020 #merryreaders @Clwojick +16

Only love and art can do this: only inside a book or in front of a painting can one truly be let into another's perspective. It has always struck me as a paradox how in the solitary arts there is something intimately communal.

...this was one of the main functions of a metropolis:
that cities are there in part to render us more intelligent and more intelligible to each other.

This one page is better than the entire 400 plus pages of The Goldfinch

@ShyBookOwl #ScavengerSaturday Round 5 #Bookhunt
I loved Siena when I went there with my parents and I would love to take my husband there too. I would love an immersive trip of the sort Matar does. His writing on art is sublime.

Spectacular

It's a beautiful, tiny memoir and love letter to a city and its art. Matar writes with the confidence of a seasoned writer but with the excitement of a toddler reaching for a favorite sweet. It is evident, he found himself in the middle of his own personal Sienese heaven. It is a wonderful book for lovers of art and art history.

Read the full review at https://onthebl.org/2020/04/17/a-month-in-siena-by-hisham-matar/

This is an exquisite small book, perfect isolation reading. I loved being in Siena with Hisham Matar. Every page has a beautiful thought to reflect on but it‘s also easy company with great art & new friends. He‘s such a lucid writer. I enjoyed The Return but found this even more moving. Highly recommended.